I’ve made a bit of progress in investigating why messages are not being
cross-posted between “rec.sport.unicycling” and “unicycling@winternet.com”.
Apparently American University posted an announcement back in June '98 that
it could no longer provide this service for free, at least not on a
consistent basis.
The good news is that the Director of Network Services at AU finally responded
to my email and has suggested “newsguy” as a potential host for providing this
gateway, again for free. This email is copied below.
I’ve already sent an email to mike@newsguy requesting info, and I’ll post
whatever answer I get. In the meantime, if any of you have any comments or
suggestions about other potential hosts for this gateway please feel free
to chime in.
-Rick Bissell
From: hersch@american.edu X-Lotus-FromDomain: AMERICANU To: Rick Bissell
<rickbissell@ncweb.com> Date: Thu, 4 Feb 1999 10:05:21 -0500 Subject: Re:
request for help
Dear Rick:
Please accept my apology for my unresponsiveness on this. The past several
months have been hectic, difficult ones for me and for the organization I work
for, and the listserv/usenet gateway we’ve run for a number of years is among
our lowest priorities.
Back in June 1998, I posted an announcement on the bit.admin newsgroup
explaining that American University could no longer support this service we’ve
provided gratis to the Internet community, and that another gateway was being
implemented by “newsguy”, also for free.
I’m appending that announcement to this email. I hope the information below
answers all questions and leads to a satisfactory relationship with newsguy.
Herschel Browne hersch@american.edu
(beginning of original message)
Subject: Gateway: Announcement from American University From:
HERSCH@american.edu (Herschel Browne) Date: 1998/06/04 Newsgroups: bit.admin
To the long-suffering users of the American University gateway: Yes, I know the
gateway has been broken for a couple of days. We’re experiencing space problems,
and it should be up again tomorrow.
However, another party has declared that they are both willing and able to
provide gateway services, as of now. While I can make no guarantees as to the
quality of service they will provide, Mike D’Alessandro, with whom I have
corresponded, seems like a generous and capable person, and believes that he can
provide this service dependably and at no charge to those interested in making
use of it. American University will continue to provide gateway service on an
“as is” basis, if you’ll forgive the euphemism, until such time as all active
users have migrated to the gateway provided by Mike and his organization
(“newsguy”).
I am appending the most recent email exchange between Mike and myself by way of
explanation. I am posting this to bit.admin and nowhere else. Please pass this
information along as you see fit to those persons or listserv lists most
interested in the subject.
Herschel Browne hersch@american.edu Director, Network Software American
University
==============included email follows =================================
Date: Mon, 01 Jun 1998 08:54:17 -0700 To: Herschel Browne <HERSCH@american.edu>
From: Mike <mike@newsguy.com> Subject: Re: News/Listserv Gateway In-Reply-To:
<199806010417.VAA07662@newsguy.com> References: <Your message of Sun, 31 May
1998 14:07:33 -0700> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=“us-ascii”
Hi Herschel,
Thanks for your reply, and posting my address to this newsgroup wouldn’t be a
problem at all. If users would like to check further into our service, you can
also refer them to our sites at the following addresses:
Basic Newsguy - <a href="http://www.newsguy.com/">http://www.newsguy.com</a> Extra Newsguy -
<a href="http://extra.newsguy.com/">http://extra.newsguy.com</a>
And then just to clarify, we will be able to provide gateway support for
facilitating messages from list-to-news and vice-versa.
I appreciate you working through this with me, and hopefully we can help some
folks out with this.
Best Regards,
Mike
At 08:07 PM 5/31/98 EDT, you wrote:
>On Sun, 31 May 1998 14:07:33 -0700 you said:
>
>>I appreciate your reply, as this clarifies everything for us. I was under the
>>assumption that you were also facilitating the listserv part of this for the
>>different lists. We already have a setup to support listservs,
but
>>if we had to support it as well as the gateway, this may have incurred
some
>>sort of cost.
>
>Great! This sounds like it might really work out for a lot of folks.
>
>>If we just need to provide the gateways for these, to support
list-to-news
>>and vice-versa, we can do all of it at no charge. This would be similar
to
>>JewishGen, although we’re just providing the list-to-news part for them.
>>
>>With this, if you’d like to put those interested in touch with me, we can get
>>them started for setup when they’re ready.
>
>May I post your email address on bit.admin, the newsgroup where people
>congregate to complain about us? (Actually, they’re very nice, and
>appreciative of the fact that we’ve provided this service for nearly ten years
>at no charge.)
>
>Again, thank you ten million times for your willingness to take this on. It’s a
>service that I feel is of great benefit to the worldwide Internet community,
>and am proud of having had a part in, and regret our inability to support in
>the future.
>
>yours,
>
>Herschel
>